Gaudy Night

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Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edward Petherbridge, Harriet Walter, Julian Barnes

I said some time ago that Dorothy L. Sayers’s mysteries were at their worst when they concentrated on the mechanics of the crime, and at their best when the crime was an incidental way of focussing upon some social or cultural issue. Gaudy Night, which now completes my reading of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, is the exception that proves the rule.

Traitor’s Purse

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Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Benjamin Black, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Charteris, M.R. James, Margery Allingham

While I’m on the subject of crime fiction, I’ve also been reading another Margery Allingham novel.

Reprint: Clouds

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Arthur Conan Doyle, Fred Hoyle, H.G. Wells, Jack McDevitt, James Tiptree Jr, Terry Bisson

Time, I think, for another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. I’m doing them in alphabetical rather than chronological order, in case you haven’t noticed, and this one first appeared in Vector 197, January-February 1998.

Reprint: Aliens

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Andrew M. Butler, Arthur C Clarke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Frederik Pohl, Gwyneth Jones, H.G. Wells, Jack Finney, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Olaf Stapledon, S Fowler Wright, Vernor Vinge

Back in 1995 (good heavens!) I began a series of columns for Vector in which I would explore various standard tropes of science fiction. The series lasted until 2001, with an extra piece added in 2005. Not a bad run. They all had pretty much the same format: a couple of illustrative quotations, then a very broad historical survey of the trope leading back to the works from which my opening quotes had been taken (it was based on a series by David Lodge that had been running in the Guardian at that time. Andrew Butler gave me a title for the series, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, and this was one of the earliest of them. It first appeared in Vector 188, August 1996.